"I say, Major, our friend here is painting your portrait."
"I hope he is making a handsome man of me," said Turner, in a
sycophantic way.
"No, he isn't. He's drawing you to the life,--as if he'd known you for
half a century."
We had entered a room about forty feet wide and a hundred feet deep,
with bare brick walls, a rough plank floor, and narrow, dingy windows,
to whose sash only a few broken panes were clinging. A row of tin
wash-basins, and a wooden trough which served as a bathing-tub, were at
one end of it, and half a dozen cheap stools and hard-bottomed chairs
were littered about the floor, but it had no other furniture. And this
room, with five others of similar size and appointments, and two
basements floored with earth and filled with _debris_, compose the
famous Libby Prison, in which, for months together, thousands of the
best and bravest men that ever went to battle have been allowed to rot
and to starve.
At the date of our visit, not more than a hundred prisoners were in the
Libby, its contents having recently been emptied into a worse sink in
Georgia; but almost constantly since the war began, twelve and sometimes
thirteen hundred of our officers have been hived within those half-dozen
desolate rooms and filthy cellars, with a space of only ten feet by two
allotted to each for all the purposes of living!
Overrun with vermin, perishing with cold, breathing a stifled, tainted
atmosphere, no space allowed them for rest by day, and lying down at
night "wormed and dovetailed together like fish in a basket,"--their
daily rations only two ounces of stale beef and a small lump of hard
corn-bread, and their lives the forfeit, if they caught but one streak
of God's blue sky through those filthy windows,--they have endured there
all the horrors of the middle-passage. My soul sickened as I looked on
the scene of their wretchedness. If the liberty we are fighting for were
not worth even so terrible a price,--if it were not cheaply purchased
even with the blood and agony of the many brave and true souls who have
gone into that foul den only to die, or to come out the shadows of
men,--living ghosts, condemned to walk the night and to fade away before
the breaking of the great day that is coming,--who would not cry out
for peace, for peace on any terms?
And while these thoughts were in my mind, the cringing, foul-mouthed,
brutal, contemptible ruffian who had caused all this misery stood within
two paces of me! I could have reached out my hand, and, with half an
effort, have crushed him, and--I did not do it! Some invisible Power
held my arm, for murder was in my heart.
"This is where that Yankee devil Streight, that raised hell so among you
down in Georgia, got out," said Turner, pausing before a jut in the wall
of the room. "A flue was here, you see, but we've bricked it up. They
took up the hearth, let themselves down into the basement, and then dug
through the wall, and eighty feet underground into the yard of a
deserted building over the way. If you'd like to see the place, step
down with me."
"We would, Major. We'd be right glad ter," I replied, adopting, at a
hint from the Judge, the Georgia dialect.
We descended a rough plank stairway, and entered the basement. It was a
damp, mouldy, dismal place, and even then--in hot July weather--as cold
as an ice-house. What must it have been in midwinter!
The keeper led us along the wall to where Streight and his party had
broken out, and then said,--
"It's three feet thick, but they went through it, and all the way under
the street, with only a few case-knives and a dust-pan."
"Wal, they _war_ smart. But, keeper, whar' wus yer eyes all o' thet
time? Down our way, ef a man couldn't see twenty Yankees a-wuckin' so
fur six weeks, by daylight, in a clar place like this yere, we'd reckon
he warn't fit ter 'tend a pen o' niggers."
The Judge whispered, "You're overdoing it. Hold in." Turner winced like
a struck hound, but, smothering his wrath, smilingly replied,--
"The place wasn't clear then. It was filled with straw and rubbish. The
Yankees covered the opening with it, and hid away among it when any one
was coming. I caught two of them down here one day, but they pulled the
wool over my eyes, and I let them off with a few days in a dungeon. But
that fellow Streight would outwit the Devil. He was the most unruly
customer I've had in the twenty months I've been here. I put him in
keep, time and again, but I never could cool him down."
"Whar' is the keeps?" I asked. "Ye's got lots o' them, ha'n't ye?"
"No,--only six. Step this way, and I'll show you."
"Talk better English," said the Judge, as we fell a few paces behind
Turner on our way to the front of the building. "There are some
schoolmasters in Georgia."
"Wal, thar' ha'n't,--not in the part I come from."
The dungeons were low, close, dismal apartments, about twelve feet
square, boarded off from the remainder of the cellar, and lighted only
by a narrow grating under the sidewalk. Their floors were incrusted with
filth, and their walls stained and damp with the rain, which, in wet
weather, had dripped down from the street.
"And how many does ye commonly lodge yere, when yer hotel's full?" I
asked.
"I have had twenty in each, but fifteen is about as many as they
comfortably hold."
"I reckon! And then the comfut moughtn't be much ter brag on."
The keeper soon invited us to walk into the adjoining basement. I was a
few steps in advance of him, taking a straight course to the entrance,
when a sentinel, pacing to and fro in the middle of the apartment,
levelled his musket so as to bar my way, saying, as he did so,--
"Ye carn't pass yere, Sir. Ye must gwo round by the wall."
This drew my attention to the spot, and I noticed that a space, about
fifteen feet square, in the centre of the room, and directly in front
of the sentinel, had been recently dug up with a spade. While in all
other places the ground was trodden to the hardness and color of
granite, this spot seemed to be soft, and had the reddish-yellow hue of
the "sacred soil." Another sentry was pacing to and fro on its other
side, so that the place was completely surrounded! Why were they
guarding it so closely? The reason flashed upon me, and I said to
Turner;--
"I say, how many barr'ls hes ye in thar'?"
"Enough to blow this shanty to ----," he answered, curtly.
"I reckon! Put 'em thar' when thet feller Dahlgreen wus a-gwine ter
rescue 'em,--the Yankees?"
"I reckon."
He said no more, but that was enough to reveal the black, seething hell
the Rebellion has brewed. Can there be any peace with miscreants who
thus deliberately plan the murder, at one swoop, of hundreds of unarmed
and innocent men?
In this room, seated on the ground, or leaning idly against the walls,
were about a dozen poor fellows who the Judge told me were hostages,
held for a similar number under sentence of death by our Government.
Their dejected, homesick look, and weary, listless manner disclosed some
of the horrors of imprisonment.
"Let us go," I said to the Colonel; "I have had enough of this."
"No,--you must see the up-stairs," said Turner. "It a'n't so gloomy up
there."
It was not so gloomy, for some little sunlight did come in through the
dingy windows; but the few prisoners in the upper rooms wore the same
sad, disconsolate look as those in the lower story.
"It is not hard fare, or close quarters, that kills men," said Judge
Ould to me; "it is homesickness; and the strongest and the bravest
succumb to it first."
In the sill of an attic-window I found a Minie-ball. Prying it out with
my knife, and holding it up to Turner, I said,--
"So ye keeps this room fur a shootin'-gallery, does ye?"
"Yes," he replied, laughing. "The boys practise once in a while on the
Yankees. You see, the rules forbid their coming within three feet of the
windows. Sometimes they do, and then the boys take a pop at them."
"And sometimes hit 'em? Hit many on 'em?"
"Yes, a heap."
We passed a long hour in the Libby, and then visited Castle Thunder and
the hospitals for our wounded. I should be glad to describe what I saw
in those "institutions," but the limits of my paper forbid it.
It was five o'clock when we bade the Judge a friendly good-bye, and took
our seats in the ambulance. As we did so, he said to us,--
"I have not taken your parole, Gentlemen. I shall trust to your honor
not to disclose anything you have seen or heard that might operate
against us in a military way."
"You may rely upon us, Judge; and, some day, give us a chance to return
the courtesy and kindness you have shown to us. We shall not forget it."
We arrived near the Union lines just as the sun was going down. Captain
Hatch, who had accompanied us, waved his flag as we halted near a grove
of trees, and a young officer rode over to us from the nearest
picket-station. We despatched him to General Foster for a pair of
horses, and in half an hour entered the General's tent. He pressed us to
remain to dinner, proposing to kill the fatted calf,--"for these my sons
were dead and are alive again, were lost and are found."
We let him kill it, (it tasted wonderfully like salt pork,) and in half
an hour were on our way to General Butler's head-quarters.
* * * * *
Here ended our last day in Dixie, and here, perhaps, should end this
article; but the time has come when I can disclose my real purpose in
seeking an audience of the Rebel leader; and as such a disclosure may
relieve me, in the minds of candid men, from some of the aspersions cast
upon my motives by Rebel sympathizers, I willingly make it. In making
it, however, I wish to be understood as speaking only for myself. My
companion, Colonel Jaquess, while he fully shared in my motives, and
rightly estimated the objects I sought to accomplish, had other, and, it
may be, higher aims. And I wish also to say, that to him attaches
whatever credit is due to any one for the conception and execution of
this "mission." While I love my country as well as any man, and in this
enterprise cheerfully perilled my life to serve it, I was only his
co-worker: I should not have undertaken it alone.
No reader of this magazine is so young as not to remember, that, between
the first of June and the first of August last, a Peace simoom swept
over the country, throwing dust into the people's eyes, and threatening
to bury the nation in disunion. All at once the North grew tired of the
war. It began to count the money and the blood it had cost, and to
overlook the great principles for which it was waged. Men of all shades
of political opinion--radical Republicans, as well as honest
Democrats--cried out for concession, compromise, armistice,--for
anything to end the war,--anything but disunion. To that the North would
not consent, and peace I knew could not be had without it, I knew that,
because on the sixteenth of June, Jeff. Davis had said to a prominent
Southerner that he would negotiate only on the basis of Southern
Independence, and that declaration had come to me only five days after
it was made.
The people, therefore, were under a delusion. They were crying out for
peace when there was no peace,--when there _could_ be no peace
consistent with the interest and security of the country. The result of
this delusion, were it not dispelled, would be that the Chicago
Convention, or some other convention, would nominate a man pledged to
peace, but willing to concede Southern independence, and on that tide of
popular frenzy he would sail into the Presidency. Then the deluded
people would learn, too late, that peace meant only disunion. They would
learn it too late, because power would then be in the hands of a Peace
Congress and a Peace President, and it required no spirit of prophecy to
predict what such an Administration would do. It would make peace on the
best terms it could get; and the best terms it could get were Disunion
and Southern Independence.
The Peace epidemic could be stayed, and the consequent danger to the
country averted, it seemed to me, only by securing in a tangible form,
and before a trustworthy witness, the ultimatum of the Rebel President.
That ultimatum, spread far and wide, would convince every honest
Northern man that war was the only road to lasting peace.
To get that ultimatum, and to give it to the four winds of heaven, were
my real objects in going to Richmond.
I did not shut my eyes to the possibility of our paving the way for
negotiations that might end in peace, nor my ears to the blessings a
grateful nation would shower on us, if our visit had such a result; but
I did not _expect_ these things. I expected to be smeared from head to
foot with Copperhead slime, to be called a knight-errant, a seeker after
notoriety, an abortive negotiator, and a meddlesome volunteer
diplomatist; but I expected also, if a good Providence spared our lives,
and my pen did not forget the English language, to be able to tell the
North the truth; and I knew that the _Truth_ would stay the Peace
epidemic, and kill the Peace party. And by the blessing of God, and the
help of the Devil, it did do that. The Devil helped, for he inspired Mr.
Benjamin's circular, and that forced home the bolt we had driven, and
shivered the Peace party into a million of fragments, every fragment now
a good War man until the old flag shall float again all over the
country.
If we accomplished this, "the scoffer need not laugh, nor the judicious
grieve," for our mountain did not bring forth a mouse,--our "mission to
Richmond" was not a failure.
It was a difficult enterprise. At the outset it seemed wellnigh
impossible to gain access to Mr. Davis; but we finally did gain it, and
we gained it without official aid. Mr. Lincoln did not assist us. He
gave us a pass through the army-lines, stated on what terms he would
grant amnesty to the Rebels, and said, "Good-bye, good luck to you,"
when we went away; and that is all he did.
It was also a hazardous enterprise,--no holiday adventure, no pastime
for boys. It was sober, serious, dangerous _work_,--and work for _men_,
for cool, earnest, fearless, determined men, who relied on God, who
thought more of their object than of their lives, and who, for truth and
their country, were ready to meet the prison or the scaffold.
If any one doubts this, let him call to mind what we had to accomplish.
We had to penetrate an enemy's lines, to enter a besieged city, to tell
home truths to the desperate, unscrupulous leaders of the foulest
rebellion the world has ever known, and to draw from those leaders,
deep, adroit, and wary as they are, their real plans and purposes. And
all this we had to do without any official safeguard, while entirely in
their power, and while known to be their earnest and active enemies. One
false step, one unguarded word, one untoward event would have consigned
us to Castle Thunder, or the gallows.
Can any one believe that men who undertake such work are mere lovers of
adventure, or seekers of notoriety? If any one does believe it, let him
pardon me, if I say that he knows little of human nature, and nothing of
human history.
I am goaded to these remarks by the strictures of the Copperhead press,
but I make them in no spirit of boasting. God forbid that I should boast
of anything we did! For _we_ did nothing. Unseen influences prompted us,
unseen friends strengthened us, unseen powers were all about our way. We
felt their presence as if they had been living men; and had we been
atheists, our experience would have convinced us that there is a GOD,
and that He means that all men, everywhere, shall be free.